Humility and Complexity

Abstract To what extent can intellectual humility be formalized? One natural idea links humility to open-mindedness, captured by a regularity principle: no coherent hypothesis should get probability zero. While debates over regularity often concern infinities, my objection is different. Regularity is feasible only for ideally rational, logically omniscient agents. Yet on a common view, humility involves appreciating our limitations—including our failure to be such agents. So whatever its merits for ideal cognition, regularity is a poor model for human humility. Indeed, taking it as such would itself be un-humble, by failing to appreciate our own epistemic limitations.